


Blue

by chickenlivesinpumpkin



Category: Captain Marvel (2019), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/F, Pre-Femslash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-23
Updated: 2019-03-23
Packaged: 2019-11-28 05:05:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18203906
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chickenlivesinpumpkin/pseuds/chickenlivesinpumpkin
Summary: All these years later, and she still can't stop thinking about that faded old T-shirt.





	Blue

Maria can handle the troll-looking motherfuckers and the cat that might be an alien and the interstellar war.  
  
This version of Carol—not a hint of crow’s feet at the corners of her curious eyes, a stranger’s eyes—is what’s going to do her in.  
  
She doesn’t even smell the same. Old Carol— _her_ Carol—was a blend of leather, strawberry shampoo, and the sharp metallic bite of F-16 steel. This one smells like space dust and cold wind and something else, something foreign and slick. It might be soap, but it’s no soap Maria’s ever come across.  
  
Her Carol had been a ping-pong ball, bouncing against any walls or barriers, wild and too fast, careening into Maria’s space and back out again, light and airy and uncontainable. Her Carol laughed loudly, with a throatiness that’d made Maria’s stomach feel like she’d just pulled 6 Gs. Her Carol is supposedly standing right here in front of her, but Maria can’t see it. This one is too still, too careful, too busy looking around at the house and the photographs and the dog tags, wondering how she fits.  
  
All those long nights when Maria had buried her face in her pillow to muffle the noise of her sobs so she wouldn’t wake her baby in the next room. Hours tucked away in the dark while her every thought was a wish: _Give her back to me. I don’t care how. I know she’s alive. She doesn’t end this way. Give her back and I’ll never ask for anything else ever again._  
  
And now there’s someone claiming to be Carol right here in front of her, and Maria feels ashamed for daring to ask for more, but she will. She’ll break her promise in a heartbeat, because this is a cheat. This is a tease.  
  
This might be _a_ Carol, but it isn’t _her_ Carol.  
  
It hadn’t occurred to her at the time that she would need to be more specific.  
  
*  
  
“But you know he did it,” Maria says, tipping her beer in Carol’s direction, a saucy _c’mon now_ across their table, and Carol bursts into laughter. She’s drunk, they both are, and talking in their outdoor voices to be heard over the jukebox. There are men looking over from half the tables in the bar, and now and then one will try his luck with flirting or getting a dance, but neither of them ever says yes.  
  
Everything they need is right here tonight. Carol’s already torn both of their coasters into a million pieces, and she’s snorting as she laughs because there isn’t a square inch of delicate flower in this woman’s body. Every time the door opens, the hot summer night climbs through, baking them in the sticky booth, making the beer bottles sweat, and Maria feels languid and damp and dizzy. Her bones are liquid in her body because Carol’s knee is knocking against her own.  
  
“You seriously think he wrote that about himself,” Carol says, hoarse and raw from laughing too hard, and Maria doesn’t think it for a second, even Sergeant Petterson isn’t that fucking pathetic, to sneak into the women’s bathroom on base to write _He’ll go down on you for hours if you let him_ , in permanent marker on the stall wall below his name and phone number. But Carol’s amused as shit, and Maria nods as if she knows for sure.  
  
“A man like that?” Maria asks. “Hell yes, he wrote it. He’s sure as shit not getting his face between some girl’s pretty thighs without a little help. He’s a born mouth breather, that one.”  
  
Carol throws her head back to laugh some more, her messy blonde hair falling into her eyes. She’s flushed from when they were singing karaoke and dancing earlier, and the skin above her upper lip is damp. Her faded blue T-shirt is dark with sweat between her breasts.  
  
Carol’s lips quirk, her chin jutting out, half-teasing, half-challenging. “You never…”  
  
“With Petterson? Are you fucking insane? Trying to insult me, Danvers?”  
  
Carol nudges her with her knee, gives her a face full of false innocence, inviting dirty confessions. “You can tell me. It’s okay. I would never judge you.”  
  
Maria nudges her back, considerably harder, and Carol snort-giggles again. It’s a terrible noise, not remotely charming, and Maria feels her belly go soft and fond and warm all over again. The table goes quiet, companionably so, as they catalog where they are in the evening. It’s after midnight. The babysitter is going to need to get home soon.  
  
They get a cab back to Maria’s. Maria goes upstairs to kiss Monica’s sleeping eyelids and straighten her covers, because the pink duvet has gotten twisted around so it lies half on the floor.  
  
When that’s done, she goes into the kitchen to pour them a nightcap. Maker’s Mark for both of them, several fingers’ worth, in water glasses because she doesn’t own anything fancier.  
  
She goes into the living room. Carol’s brushing her teeth in the doorway of the downstairs bathroom, one elbow propped up on the jamb, all long, coltish legs in that ancient pair of basketball shorts she keeps here for the nights she stays over, face pink from being washed with hand soap, hair tied back in a ponytail. She’s still wearing that faded blue T-shirt, but her bra is gone, leaving her breasts soft and full beneath the taut fabric. Her nipples are a barely-visible tease, round and secretive, if Maria dares to look.  
  
She doesn’t dare.  
  
When Carol is done brushing, she comes to collapse onto the couch beside Maria. Their feet get tangled together in her grandmother’s old afghan, both of them smelling like cheap liquor and cigarettes and sweat, drinking their bourbon together with the lights off, only the cicadas outside breaking the silence.  
  
“Hey,” Carol says suddenly. “It was a good night, huh?”  
  
“Yeah,” Maria replies. She can feel the heat of Carol’s thigh beside her own, the skin no doubt soft and downy. “Yeah, it really was.”  
  
Carol nods and drains the last of her drink. “You okay?”  
  
And this is her moment, Maria knows. This is her chance to say it.  
  
Maybe this time she’ll find the words. _Let me touch you. Let me taste you. Let me have you._  
  
They’ve had a hundred of these nights over the years. A hundred quiet, still moments. A hundred chances that Maria had breathed tentatively into, waiting, wondering if this was the time she’d find the nerve, wondering how she’d survive if Carol jerked back or said no or—maybe worst of all—apologized for not wanting what Maria could never manage to completely put away, no matter what else was going on in their lives. A hundred pauses, waiting for words that she’d never spoken. She’d tried it out in the privacy of her own bedroom a few times, practicing, her hand busy beneath her sheets. _Come here_ , she’d mouth to her own ceiling. _Let me. Please let me. I’ll let you._  
  
She’d keep talking to herself even after she came, practicing all the other things she’d always wanted to say and never dared: _If you let me, I’ll pour you orange juice in the mornings when you’re warm from my blankets and you smell like me. You’re strong and you have my back and you taste like cheap beer and sweetness and I think you’d bite me if you could and I’d let you, I’d like it, and I’d let you raise my daughter because you’re everything I’ve always wanted to be, everything I’ve always wanted to taste, everything, everything._  
  
But she’s never asked. Never said those words.  
  
And this night is no different in that respect. She just shakes her head and says she’s fine and goes upstairs.  
  
This is the night that sticks in her mind later, though. A million times she never said anything, and this is the time she remembers, because after this night there were no more nights at all, because there’d been no more Carol.  
  
Carol was the one who’d vanished, but Maria thought sometimes that she was the one who’d died.  
  
*  
  
She isn’t sure this is Carol, this stranger who carries herself like she’s waiting for another blow to land. Who looks on Maria with suspicion. Who softens for Monica, but only because everyone softens for Monica, only an animal wouldn’t soften for Monica.  
  
_Soften for me_ , Maria wants to say. They’re standing in the yard and Maria’s ears are full of Carol’s fast, refusing-to-panic words from the black box, and that alien motherfucker is talking about wanting a world of his own, and all Maria can think about is her own world, the woman who used to be her world.  
  
It’s funny, maybe, that she can only find the words that would convince her Carol of how important she is now, when there’s only a stranger left to hear them.  
  
But later, when she sees Carol in the new suit, all red and gold and blue, that exact shade of blue, it reminds her of that faded old T-shirt, and she thinks _maybe._  
  
_Maybe._


End file.
